If you missed the “Plugging In” panel at this year’s Entrepreneur University, don’t worry- we can still be friends, and we’ll even share some tips on how you can maximize your networking opportunities around town.  We are happy feature this post by Josh Maher, Lunch 2.0 founder, the genius behind “Obey the Decider“, NWEN panelist and networking guru.    Check out the Thoughts on Networking post on Josh’s blog, and plenty of other juicy tidbits on his site. And if you still have an appetite for networking tips, please find another quick read on Networking 101.  Enjoy!

Thoughts on Networking

By joshmaher

I promised a follow-up to my last post, how to get plugged-in to the local network after I spoke at NWEN’s Entrepreneur University. It’s also a great follow-up to the last post about working less. So if you are looking for work, there are some things here that are good to learn. Thanks for everyone who sent feedback on their thoughts about the Seattle Startup community and networking in general. Here is half of the talk we gave at the NWEN EU event…

NWEN EU – Plugging-in

It was a lot of fun and interesting to learn from the attendees and co-panelists (Nathan Kaiser, Danielle Morrill, and Dave Schappell) what problems they had with networking and how hidden the local community appears when you are an outsider looking in.

The five points that I found most applicable were:

1. Do more favors for people in the community than you get from the community. The quality of favors you get in return will be worth it.
2. Ask for advice, not for assistance.
3. There are always going to be too many places to network and too many events to go to. Network where it is most convenient for you as you.
4. It’s ok to mix personal and business networking, it’s more fun when you are doing business with people you enjoy.
5. Use tools and system to manage who you are networking with, when you are networking, and why. Things like LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, salesforce are all great to help manage all of the connections and conversations. They are all useless if you are not using them to network with the people who will add value to what you are doing.

(6) – bring some breath mints or gum or something – bad breath sucks

A few of the follow-up conversations I had were also interesting…

I spoke with an attendee about the power of LinkedIN and how to go about using it to plan a conversation with someone either online or in-person. We used a scenario of a connecting with a Sr. Researcher at a company of interest. For my brief demonstration, I’ll say that I have a startup where I am trying to build a new touch based device that includes components of augmented reality for a medical purpose. For this I would start with a good LinkedIN search such as:

From here, I would expect to get a few folks in the Microsoft Research team locally and perhaps get some success…

With 9 results, I may not have much luck, but there isn’t too far to go to find out if I have a shot at finding the person that I’m looking for or not. To start, I’ll drill into each of these, keeping in mind that 2nd leve connections are easier to get to than 3rd level connections. So I’ll drill into Patrick Baudisch and see what I can find.

It doesn’t appear Patrick keeps his LinkedIN profile up to date which may be the case for researcher types. Business types are usually different and have a lot of information about what they do on their profile. The important thing though, is that Patrick does point us to his personal website. So let’s have a look…

ok, straight off of his website, this guy has done some projects with multi-touch at a nano level and blindsight (by the looks of the picture and name, I get the sense that he has figured out what is behind an object even though we can’t see it (kind of augmented reality). Hmm, sounds like a guy that may be up my alley, definitely worth following up with. Flipping back over to his profile, it’s time to see how easy I can make the introduction and if this guy would be interested in talking to me.

Looking back at the profile, I see that we are both connected to Scott Bright. I happen to be connected to Scott because of MindCamp (hence the need to attend a few good events, do some favors, so that you have the right connections to leverage when you need them).

In this case, I would ask Scott for some advice on how to meet people in the space that I’m looking for. If he doesn’t offer Patrick as a connection, I would ask directly about an introduction in-person or online.

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Author’s note: Thanks again to Mr. Maher for letting us re-post! Josh has great pay-it-forward karma and always minty-fresh breath.

As a sponsor of Startup Day and entrepreneur enthusiast, here’s a quick shout out and thanks to the Seattle 2.0 team and the army of volunteers who pulled off a great event!  The day was chock-full of casual conversations, and terrific speakers, who shared at least one common element: passion.  They combined healthy (if occasionally daunting) realism, with success stories, inspiration, and practical advice.   Full disclosure—while busy staffing NWEN’s display table, I couldn’t glean every ounce of advice from every speaker, so some sound-bytes and side-bars are reflected below.  That said, check out my personal top-ten take-aways:

• Caffeine’s got nothin on Cooperman. Started off the day with coffee, granola bars, and Hillel Cooperman, dropping an average of two f-bombs per minute, but great advice and anecdotes.
• Two to tango. Ksenia Oustiougova spoke candidly about the challenge of asking for support from the men in our lives (fill in “partner” of any kind and this is true.) Andy Sack’s start-up checklist includes the absolute necessity of getting buy-in and support from your significant other.
• Release early and often. Though his topic was on financing, talking with TA McCann at the event, he’s a poster-child for the importance of beta testing—lather, rinse, repeat..  Gist had something like 47 builds before the official launch. Absolutely fanatical about customer feedback. No wonder FOGs (friends of Gist) are a large and loyal audience!
• Just the stats, man. Dave Schappell’s estimate: one in 15 attendees of Startup Day will actually go try and start a business (and I’m just guessing this is a subset of the 25% of the audience who raised their hands when asked if they’d been called a workaholic before).  Talking with attendees, all of whom found the sessions valuable, a few said: I learned at this conference that I do, in fact, need to keep my day job. Good to learn that now, instead of a bank loan, two mortgages, and three awkward holidays asking friends and family for money later—this is clearly not for the faint of heart.
• People need people. We’ve all heard it before, but Alex Berg suggested a new twist on an old favorite: Jerks are “little jerk factories”; all the sudden you come to work wondering why you don’t like anyone you work with.  Every hire counts (and evidently multiplies!).
• Pick one. Ben Huh: you can be big or focused, but not both. It’s like the project management adage: you want good, cheap and fast?  Pick two.  Ben’s content-rich presentation on the stunning realities of monetizing web traffic dove-tailed nicely with Alex Castro’s talk on revenue models for Software as a Service offerings.  Good stuff.
• Fumpany. Mike Mathieu quipped that the worst insult you can get is: “That’s not a startup, it’s a feature.”  Back in my Alliance of Angels days, my colleague Kevin used to call those “fumpanies” (vs. companies).  If you’re a one-trick pony that could be considered a feature of an existing product, ask yourself what’s to stop the developer of that product adding on that bell or whistle themselves.
• The gift that keeps on giving: Check out the Startup Day twitter stream.  Lots of gems here culled from speaker presentations.
• Got a dog-sitter (thanks, Dave Schappell!).  Now it’s official.
• Got a couple offers for side jobs (thanks, Marcelo, for the pleasure of introducing Ben Huh, Ksenia Oustiougova, Alex Castro and Jonathan Sposato—extra love to the always-gracious Jonathan for suggesting that I become a voice coach—I’ll definitely keep my day job, but got a few business cards from folks wanting to pay for some voice-over work).

So if you’re in that elite group of folks who are inspired by what you heard and Startup Day, what next?  In this reporter’s opinion, sign up now for Entrepreneur University. It’s a logical next step where we’ll both inspire you with nationally recognized speakers and local heroes, and put you to work. With four interactive workshops peppered throughout the day, get your hands dirty wrestling with such challenges as “Will the dog eat the dog food? “How do I finance this puppy?”  “ How can I give my elevator pitch a lift? “ And “How can I harness social media and take the power to the people?”   Not to mention 90 minutes in which you can sit down with an investor one-on-one in our always-popular VC bistro….and/or sign up for a lunch date with experts in raising money, marketing, sales, law, and entrepreneurship.  Hope to see you there!

PS: Though we don’t plan to monetize these particular voice-overs, the NWEN board and friends will be showcasing their karaoke stylings at Hula Hula tonight at 7 PM.   Just sayin. If you read this blog post in time, don’t be shy…join us and grab the mic.